"Solving the Beale Papers" proves one of the world's most famous unsolved cipher mysteries does not lead to a buried treasure but instead contains a series complex Masonic allegories, written in celebration of unique events which occurred within Freemasonry between 1880 and 1883.

These papers were written in the early nineteenth century and supposedly lead to a great fortune that is buried somewhere in the hills of Virginia. To date, it has never been recovered. The papers were left locked inside a metal box, in the care of a trusted friend. He had instructions to open them if, after ten years, nothing more had been heard of their owner, Mr Beale.

The Beale ciphers are a set of three ciphertexts, one of which allegedly states the location of a buried treasure of gold and silver estimated to be worth over 30 million US dollars in the present time. The other two ciphertexts allegedly describe the content of the treasure, and list the names of the treasure's owners' next of kin, respectively. The story of the three ciphertexts originates from an 1885 pamphlet detailing treasure being buried by a man named Thomas Jefferson Beale in a secret location in Virginia in 1820. Beale entrusted the box containing the encrypted messages with a local innkeeper named Robert Morriss and then disappeared, never to be seen again. The innkeeper gave the three encrypted ciphertexts to a friend before he died. The friend then spent the next twenty years of his life trying to decode the messages, and was able to solve only one of them which gave details of the treasure buried and the general location of the treasure. Since the publication of the pamphlet, a number of attempts have been made to decode the two remaining ciphertexts and to find the treasure, but all have resulted in failure.

This vintage book contains Alexander D’Agapeyeff’s famous 1939 work, Codes and Ciphers - A History of Cryptography. Cryptography is the employment of codes and ciphers to protect secrets, and it has a long and interesting history. This fantastic volume offers a detailed history of cryptography from ancient times to modernity, written by the Russian-born English cryptographer, Alexander D'Agapeyeff. The contents include: - The beginnings of Cryptography - From the Middle Ages Onwards - Signals, Signs, and Secret Languages - Commercial Codes - Military Codes and Ciphers - Types of Codes and Ciphers - Methods of Deciphering Many antiquarian texts such as this, especially those dating back to the 1900s and before, are increasingly hard to come by and expensive, and it is with this in mind that we are republishing this book now in an affordable, modern, high quality edition. It comes complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.